Liberation by Hearing: Sound and Listening to the Liminal

Undergraduate

What does dying sound like? How do we listen to dreams? How can hearing itself become a spiritual practice, or even a path to liberation? With roots grounded in Tibetan Buddhism and branches extending across fields, disciplines, and areas, this course explores sound as a medium of religious experiences of transition and intermediacy. Life-death. Lucidity-dreaming. Desire-renunciation. We look at these instances not as moments of passage, but borderlands to be dwelled in, where sound and listening become charged with the work of guiding, unsettling, or transforming consciousness. Act I begins with a broad foundation in studies of sound, listening, and religion before introducing Buddhist frameworks and the role of mantra in tantric practice. Act II examines how sonic practices accompany dying and afterlife transitions, along with how sensory experiences can be catalysts for awakening. Act III considers the liminal space between dreams and wakefulness where Tibetan visionary practices meet comparative perspectives on dreaming, consciousness, and history. Act IV investigates the relationship between sound and longing, sexuality, and renunciation through Tibetan songs of realization. Finally, Act V turns to avant-garde appropriations of Tibetan Buddhist theories of transition, exploring how technologies of listening transform religious experience. HU W 9:25am-11:20am